Frank Schilling and Shoemoney recently had two great posts about Google. When combined I think they paint a picture of Google that skips past the rhetoric and double talk. Frank said:

As a publisher, I've always viewed Google as a bit of a predator in this context.. taking publishers in, convincing them to serve Google ads, and then allowing those publishers to toil for Google, working sites into their algo to serve the beast, all for increasing revenues, finally to have Google's algorithm scrub you from the index if you become too successful at punching ad converting pages to the top.. Good publishers take on the role of sacrificial lamb to show the algo guys where the holes are and they get to ride the express elevator to the street as a reward.

Shoemoney's video about avoiding getting hit by Google stated that the key is just don't do things that make Google look stupid or undermine the perceived magic that occurs at Google.

My site that Matt Cutts hand removed from Google's search results got too much exposure and Matt killed it not because the site was spammy, but because it was mine and it was getting too much mainstream traction and exposure. My marketing was too appealing, aggressive, and effective. In another year that site would have been untouchable, and that thought made Matt Cutts feel uncomfortable.

The Changing Desires of the Magical Fictitious Average User

• One day Google sells the story of how "PageRank reflects the unique democratic reflection of the web" and a day later they talk about "hand editing to protect our users".
• One day they talk about how "Users don’t want to see results sorted by who has the biggest pocketbook." and the next day they are talking about how "ads are a type of information".
• One day they talk about how "the FTC believes ads need to be clearly marked" and the next day they tell publishers to blend ads in the content and remove the ads by Google notification from their own ads.

How Relevancy is Defined

• Money to Google = relevant, good user experience.
• Large profit stream going elsewhere = spam, unless such classification hurts Google.
• Relevancy algorithms and user priorities change to match Google's business interests. Spam is redefined as business partnerships allow Google to increase revenues. Google is never considered spam, even if Google pays their partners to steal your entire website and wrap it in Google ads.

With Google, the whole concept of relevancy is a shifting mind control game. As long as you do not get the wrong types of exposure you can make a lot of money without them doing anything about it. Go too mainstream with something a little sketchy or something with the scent of smart SEO to it and they will try to kill you out of resentment, jealousy, and to try to protect the lies that their business model are based on.

Having searched hundreds of times on google.ca and google.com.ph I see some subtle differences in how the top ranked global / US results are mixed into international results.

• High authority sites do not tend to rank as well internationally as they do in the US. Domain trust counts less. As an example, Matt Cutts recently posted about his favorite omron pedometer. He is right near the top on Google.com, but it a bit lower internationally.
• Low authority sites that were near the top of the global search results tend to rank a bit better internationally. My mom has a lower link authority weight loss blog and has also posted about her favorite omron pedometer, and ranks better internationally than she does in the US results.
• Exact match domains ("mykeyword.com" matches [mykeyword] and [my keyword]) seem to get a bit more love in international search results than in the US results.
• The domain love is even moreso if it is a local domain extension.
• Trusted local sites are aggressively mixed into the search results, especially for queries that would hint a local preference. In one local market I saw a local thin affiliate site ranking in the top 3 for a core mortgage term, and the site was only PageRank 2.

As a public facing SEO who has many thousands of customers at the beginning of the SEO learning cycle many of my most common questions I get asked come as a result of Google half truths. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a few of these down to save myself time answering the same emails each day.

It may be inappropriate to label Google as a liar for doing the following. A more appropriate and more fair label would be an intentionally deceitful organization.

Want Link Data? Go Elsewhere

Google offers a link: function which shows a sampling of inbound links to a website. A few years back they had a much smaller allotment of machines for handling link queries, so they used to show mostly a sample of the most authoritative inbound links to a site. Then they started showing mostly lower quality inbound links, while filtering out most of the better ones. But they explain that they doubled the size of the sample, and showed more links to smaller mom and pop websites that lacked high authority inbound links, so it was a good feature for users.

When you hear some people at Google talk about this they talk about it, they tend to talk about "from a historical perspective" and explain how they used to be limited, but they still use virtually ALL link data in calculating result relevancy. Given that last statement then the "from a historical perspective" is self serving positioning about not providing a useful feature because they want to make SEO harder.

Want further proof? If you sign up for Google Webmaster Central and verify your site they will show you all your linkage data. I don't trust Google Webmaster Central because they profile SEOs and hand edit the search results. Signing up is probably an unwise decision.

Google does offer us a free tool to estimate link authority though: PageRank.

Google PageRank

For as hyped as Google PageRank is, Google sure goes out of their way to ensure the values are inaccurate. They only update the Google Toolbar display about once every three months. Even then, when they update it that is not fresh for that day...those stats might be from a week, two weeks, or a month ago. Also sometimes the toolbar is buggy and shows the wrong PageRank values, where viewing the same page multiple times in a row will yield different PageRank values each time.

The only reasons they still place PageRank on the toolbar is because they get free marketing out of it, and it helps them collect more usage data. Years ago Apostolos Gerasoulis, the search scientist behind Teoma, said Google doesn't rely heavily on PageRank to score relevancy. Gigablast's Matt Wells said similar:

PageRank is just a silly idea in practice, but it is beautiful mathematically. You start off with a simple idea, such as the quality of a page is the sum of the quality of the pages that link to it, times a scalar. This sets you up with finding the eigen vectors of a huge sparse matrix. And because it is so much work, Google appears not to be updating its PageRank values that much.

Any webmaster with an old URL that ranks exceptionally well with almost no PageRank knows that PageRank didn't drive them to outrank people with 10 times their link equity.

PageRank is important for one aspect of information retrieval though: crawl depth. If you have a lot of PageRank then you will get crawled deeply and more frequently. If not, then they will crawl shallow, and perhaps place many of your pages in the supplemental results.

Are My Pages in Google's Supplemental Results?

Want to know what pages from your site are rarely crawled, cached, or updated? Want to know where your duplicate content issues exist? Want to know what pages from your site we don' t trust links from or trust enough to rank well for many search results? Look at the supplemental results. Oops, they took that label out of the results, but here is a more complicated search you can use to find your supplemental results, at least until it gets disabled. Jim Boykin and Danny Sullivan also offered tips on finding supplemental pages.

Right now a Google search for Google supplemental results provides low quality search results because most of the top results (including my #1 ranking at the moment) do not discuss how to find supplemental results. Unfortunately if you only heard of the supplemental results AFTER they took the label out you likely will have no way of telling if any of your pages are supplemental, which is good for seasoned marketers but bad for mom and pop. If I don't edit my post then people will think I am a liar or an idiot because Google is deceptive.

If they truly wanted to make the world's information universally accessible and useful why would they remove this label? At the very least, if webmasters paid attention to this label they would structure their sites better and help Google save bandwidth by not having Google crawl as many low quality pages.

The easiest way to get out of the supplemental results is to clean up site structure issues and build more high quality link authority. Cleaning up site structure issues is much harder now that it is harder to see what is in the supplemental results, and each day it gets harder to build honest links due to Google spreading FUD about links...

Organic Linking Patterns

With all the FUD Google spreads about paid links they make many webmasters afraid to link out to other sites, which reduces the quality of information available on those sites, and prevents some quality sites from ranking where they should. Nofollow is not about being organic. In fact, it was a tool created to directly manipulate the public's perception of linking. To appreciate how out of hand it is, consider the following situation.

A friend's business got covered by a mainstream media site. They wrote an entire article about his business but did not link to him because they felt linking would have made the article too promotional. Imagine being the topic of an article and the source of content for other sites without attribution for it. That is the side effect of Google's bought links FUD.

Instead of promoting quality content current relevancy algorithms support information pollution. Google goes out and scares you about keeping your link profile natural while letting proxies hack your rankings. And they have known about this problem for years, just like 302 redirect.

Since Google's link guidelines are self-serving and out of nature with the realities of the web, what happens if I get aggressive with link building and eventually get busted for doing the same things my competitors are getting away with doing?

Lose All Your Link Equity (and Your Content and Your Brand, Too!)

Your Site Goes to Jail, You DO NOT Collect $200

Many webmasters have suffer the fate of hand editing recently. The site of mine that they hand edited had about 95% of its links cleanly built by me, with the other 5% coming before I bought the site. Because it was my site they wiped away ALL of its link equity via a hand edit (simply because I bought a site that had some link equity). What makes hand edits worse is when they follow up a hand edit by paying an AdSense spammer to steal all of your content and then rank his site where you ranked prior to the hand edit.

When sites are hand penalized, they typically do not even rank for their own brand related keywords unless the webmaster buys their own brand name in Google AdWords, which means Google is even willing to sacrifice their relevancy to punish webmasters who fall outside of Google's evershifting rule-set. Unfortunately that punishment is doled out in an uneven fashion. Large corporations can own 10 first page rankings, or use 100 subdomains, but if you do the same with a smaller website expect a swift hand edit. Even programmers who support Google's API get a hand edit from time to time.

Rank Checkers & Google API Keys

Were you one of the early programmers to build a tool that use the SOAP version of Google's API? Sorry, but they no longer offer Google Search API keys. Their (formerly useful) API has came back as an academic only project which they can use to recruit college students studying information retrieval.

Anyone who built a tool based on Google's old API now has to explain to people why their tools broke. Google wanted the tools to break so they could replace the useful API with something worse. In fact, Google is pulling back more data in other spots, even when third parties create tools to add features that should have been core to Google's products. Let's take a look at AdSense.

Google AdSense Stats

Google does not tell smaller webmasters what their payout percentage is, what keywords triggered the ads, or what ads get clicked on. Some third party tools were created to help track the ads and keywords, but Google disabled those.

If you think about this, Google is directly undermining the profitability of their partners by hoarding data. If I know what sections of my site perform well then it is easier for me to create high value content in those areas. The more profitable my site is the more money I have to reinvest into building more content and higher quality content.

It doesn't make sense that they ban high quality content just because it is owned by an SEO, then fund the growing dirty field of cybersquatting. I invested nearly $100,000 into building an AdSense site, until it got hand edited and I realized how AdSense really works, cannibalizing the value of content and making your site too dependant on Google as a traffic source.

Summary

If Google was honestly interested in creating a maximally efficient marketplace they wouldn't disable third party tools, hold back information, and keep changing their systems to confuse webmasters. They wouldn't hand edit real sites that thousands of webmasters vote for. And they would not be spreading FUD amongst the market. They would simply find a way to monetize the markets, push out inefficiencies, and grow additional revenue streams.

In some cases, if you register your site with Google they may give you a few more crumbs of info, but unless you have scale they want you to fail. What they really want, like any for profit power hungry authoritative system, is control of your attention and information, so they can ensure as many dollars as possible flow through them. Look no further than their position on the health care industry to see their true vision for making information universally accessible and useful. Ads are a type of information:

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

Looking Forward

Eventually Google will launch Claim Your Content.com, which is yet another way for them to get you to register your work with them so they can more easily profile webmasters and hand edit SEO owned sites. Allegedly it will help prevent content theft, but once it comes out, expect duplicate content filters to stagnate or get worse unless you sign up for their service. Dirty? Yes, but so is deceiving people to increase corporate profits. The above 7 examples are just a small set of the whole.

Sometimes when a Google engineer decides he is pissed off at a site he or she may penalize the site in a way that the company does not rank in the top 30 results for any search query, including branded navigational queries. Imagine if you search for SeoBook and couldn't find this site? How is that a good user experience for searchers using Google? It is their index, so I think it is fair if Google nukes sites that they dislike for non-brand queries, but when they do it for brand related queries too, they make their search results irrelevant and provide a bad user experience. What makes the situation worse than it needs to be?

• the definition of relevancy changes depending on Google's business interests

• the definition of spam changes depending on Google's business interests
• Google is unpredictable in their hand editing
• if Google does not like a particular market they may hand edit the leading company while leaving competitors ranking at the top of the search results for the competitor's brand. in some cases they penalize the cleanest services while leaving dirtier market players easily accessible
• even if a site is deemed as spam and penalized they can still buy ads on Google, which makes it seem as though it is only spam if Google isn't getting paid

If Google wants to become the default way we access all information can they continue to penalize brands for their official brand names?

A large part of the search marketing game that gets little discussion is perception. Are the search results relevant? Are the search results fresh? Is there adequate result diversity? Is that particular result worthy of that ranking? What techniques did they use to rank there?

User vs Engineer Perspective

Gord Hotchkiss does a great job covering the searcher's perspective, but rarely do you get to see how a search engineer thinks of the results. This NYT article offered a snapshot, but that has been filtered through the public relations team. The results show not what the engineers want, but the best they can do given their current mindset and computing resources.

Reading Changes in the Search Results

If you can learn to read changes in the results you can see what they are trying to fix right now, what issues will become a big problem, and what issues they do not care about. For example, right now, Google does not care for result diversity. They are so afraid of small spam sites that they:

• allow garbage search results from authoritative domains to rank for a wide array of keywords

• allow category leaders to own the first page of search results

Why You Should NOT Trust a Search Engineer's Blog

You can't really trust the perspective of a blog posted by a search engineer because they typically discuss the view of search from an ideal world. In addition, the role of the search engineer blog is to control and manipulate public perception more than it is to share useful information. In some cases they tell you how going off topic is wrong, while they are proud to cite your off topic marketing and praise it if you are syndicating their spin.

If You Were a Search Engineer, Would You Lie?

When you look at how they try to manipulate people you can see the holes in their algorithms. They are nothing but an algorithm, an ad network, marketing, and how they manipulate people to cede power and authority to their fickle relevancy algorithms. If they are hypocritical in their view of the web then manipulation is a large and important piece required for them to keep what authority they have.

How to Spam Google Right Now

A few tips they don't want you to know the truth about:

• Buying old sites works amazingly well.

• Buying and redirecting sites works amazingly well.
• Paid links work amazingly well, and you have a strong brand or can tolerate a bit of risk you would be an idiot not to exploit that hole.
• Exact match domain names play a good role in helping a site rank for the associated keyword phrase.
• The supplemental results suck, but they don't want the portion of the web they throw into it to realize just how bad it sucks.
• The search results have a lot of hand editing in them. Hand editing is gratuitous for smaller websites, but they are afraid to edit out large corporations.

Why might Google refer to some of the above techniques as spam? Simply because they are effective. We don't write the algorithms. We give the search engines what they want.

Have You Ever Been Hand Edited?

Search relevancy algorithms change depending on what types of spamming are popular and effective at the time. After experiencing your first hand edit on something you worked hard to build it changes the way you perceive search engines, and how much you are able to respect them. If you are a professional you are not supposed to take it personally, but it is hard not to if you have to fire all of your employees.

Why is it that one person can review your site and kill your business model, but they wrap their ads around people stealing your content and it is a long drawn out process to get them to fix that problem? It is just an extension of how Google thinks of consumers. If you don't have lawyers they don't give a crap about you.

What is Spam?

Spam used to be irrelevant, but now that the web is a direct marketing channel spam is typically more seen as being focused on who was paid to achieve the results. Search relevancy algorithms are based on ad sales. Something that is spam is perfectly acceptable if Google gets a buck a click out of it. Ad networks dictated by automation and economic efficiency also push a lot of fraud. Consider the following:

• McAfee conducted a study showing that paid search results are at least twice as likely to scam consumers as organic search results

• many of the most profitable ads are profitable because they are misleading or exploit common psychological weaknesses. Google's CPA ads are virtually unmarked, and Google opted publishers into the program without even asking for their permission.
• Google sold AdWords ads promoting preteen sex
• Google sold AdWords ads promoting Ponzi scheme investment fraud
• Google syndicated ads on the largest Warez site
• Google removed disclosure from many of their syndicated ads
• Google has placed unmarked ads in their search results
• Google funds an overwhelming majority of copyright and trademark violations
• Google sells AdSense ads on sites they removed from their index for spamming
• Google recommended HMOs carpet bomb consumers with deceitful educational messaging

Much of their profit margins come from supporting fraud, but most people do not realize the extent of it.
Why is Google's ad centric view of the web viewed as more honest than any other business model?

How to React to a Hand Edit

The way to look at search is that they want their techniques to be robust and scalable. Anytime a search engineer does something to you that is unjust and draconian it is because they have a huge hole in their algorithm. After you get hand edited the four strategies worth exploring are

• how to obfuscate your identity

• how to scale exploiting the holes which required a search engineer to try to destroy your business
• how to make your "spam" fit their view of relevancy so they don't go out of their way to keep hand editing your businesses
• let others know if you think something is dishonest so you can help them avoid trusting it too much